Finally did the Name Justice!l

Scraping Pegs.

I lived up to the name. Now I need to re-evaluate my ability.

One great thing about riding a motorcycle is that it is an intellectual pursuit as much as a physical one. Many people just hop on and ride and think it is good enough. In reality, to advance your skills, you have to learn from available resources. You have to be aware of what you are doing wrong, what is "right", and what works for you. You can find this out from trial and error, but first you have to get pointed in the right direction.

Sometimes this comes in the form of a coach, sometimes it's a book. The best people got help somewhere along the way.

I picked up Lee Parks' Total Control a few months ago.
I LOVE IT.

I've been battling some mental roadblocks on looking through the turn, and decided one of his drills would take care of it. It's 40' circle with a cone in the middle. After sloppily circling the cone, my line slowly smoothed out, and I approached a zen-like state. Although my world was spinning, the cone suddenly slowed down as a forced myself to concentrate on it. It was as if it was the only thing in the parking lot, slowing rotating to my left, then *****SCRAAAAAAPEEEEE**** felt my shoes vibrate through the toe.

I immediately straightened the bike, and tried to figured out what the heck just happened. Upon closer inspection, I actually dragged my toe. Interesting...

My right turns were horrible. It felt sloppy, and took me a while to actually do a circle, instead of an oval, or any other number of organic shapes. Eventually, while leaned over to the right, I heard the sound again. I checked the bike again, and the peg feeler was ground slightly at the tip.

Now that I'm figuring out the maximum lean angles on the bike, as well as conquering some of my vision issues, it may be time to make some changes in body positioning. One step forward and three steps back.

I'm going to have to learn to hang off...

MSF Course

I'm late typing this one up... I've been too busy riding. :)

If you just bought a bike, and you want to start riding it, do yourself a favor:

Take the MSF course first.

True, everyone there probably had their loved ones rubbing their butt in baby oil afterwards, but it was the most rewarding thing I've done in a long time.

If you follow this blog at all, you can see I've been riding in parking lots until I felt comfortable. I did eventually feel pretty good on the bike, and started to think I had some basic skills down. I was wrong. I may have been okay on my bike, but I quickly in the course saw that the basic skills I thought I'd learned were not easily transferred to another bike. I went with my buddy Bil, who was a natural on the damn thing. Oh well, he doesn't have one- I have time to hone my skills.

The course consists of a classroom day that was about four hours, and two days of riding at six hours a pop. Not bad for $150 bucks. And that's just the basic format of the course- If you go to Balance Dynamics in Georgetown, KY, you get two of the greatest instructors I've ever encountered. Dinah and Bill are fantastic teachers, riders, and people. Their personalities seem very different with the exception of their love of riding. I'm surprised they didn't have bugs in their teeth, because they were smiling on every exercise. Their different approaches give the course a good cop, bad cop feel. Go through Dinah's line, and you are offered great encouragement; go through Bill's line, and you know everything you did wrong. As the son of a Sgt Major, I chose Bill's line most of the time. :)

All in all, the class was great, and I left with valuable knowledge that I could use to improve my riding. I'll be there for the next one, so I can try it on my own bike.